But

pleasure to which the soldier, during active warfare, is continually exposed. I had purchased my lieutenancy while in Spain, and a company previous to the battle of Waterloo, where, to compensate the tortures of a long-opened wound, I gained an empty brevet, and on my regiment being disbanded, was left upon the shoals and shallows of a half pay, from which I, for some time, vainly struggled to push off into the deep but contracted channel of employment. having no friend both able and willing to assist me, nor any other means of interest, I was necessarily laid on the shelf, neglected and forgotten. Possessed of a little military rank, and some few medals, to wear which (such is the anomaly of refined feelings) would only expose me to the charge of vanity, and perhaps to the sneers of the scorner, I now gave way to my former feelings. Life presented no variety – society required a courtship I could never condescend to pay -- the little credit I had gained, was not known, or, if known, was disregardedmy income was curtailed: I saw others not more than my equals, honoured and rewarded, and with a mind soured by disappointment and chagrin, I relapsed into the state from which

hope, ardour, zeal, and the love of glory had, for a time, roused me; and retiring from the world, I had recourse to books for the only occupation that could keep the resentments of disappointment in check. The better to indulge my feelings, and to give way to the spleen kindled by the disgusts of life, I took up such works as, while they afforded me the most congenial amusement, encouraged the hatred that I now unnaturally entertained against my own species. Voltaire, from the thorough acquaintance I had gained of the French language, I read, not only with avidity, but with such a malicious retention of memory, as made all the master-strokes of his hatred to God or Man familiar to me. From Voltaire I resorted to Hume, Bolingbroke, and Gibbon, and finally to Godwin and Paine, until I rose a complete, though not an avowed, infidel. I had frequently heard it declared, that no man in the fair possession of his senses could really be an Atheist; but this was a character which, from resentment of imaginary wrongs, wrongs that I could not substantiate, and dared not proclaim, and from the false and wicked pride of singularity, I had now brought myself to believe that I exclu

sively maintained. In support of my new tenets, I added to the fallacious reasoning which my reading had supplied, every other power of argument of which I was master. Scarcely, however, had I brought myself into an established conviction of the truth of Atheism, before I was attacked with a bodily disorder, which afflicted me for a considerable time, and in so severe a manner, that I began to conceive it impossible to survive it. As I had scarcely any friends and but few acquaintances, and was now unable to read, I was necessarily left to a long and deep reflection upon my dangerous state, during which my mind was gradually brought by a train of consequences to revolt from the idea of that annihilation to which, upon my own principles, my body was liable. I saw that it was natural for man to cling to life, and this adherence to vitality seemed to me at first to be owing to the dread of parting with a thing that was to die for ever; for if, as some affirmed, it were better to live hereafter than at present, why not secure the future good by pressing forward from the first to the second and better state? But upon more mature consideration I saw, and felt, also, that a hope was seated at the bottom of my heart

which rested on the basis of another state of existence, as a state of immortality and repose: an immortality which was to be inferred from the faculties and endowments of the mind; and a repose to which the mind seemed naturally, as it were, to look as the only balm for the various disappointments, vexations, and sorrows of a busy, agitated, and transient life. Besides this, I could not, upon my own principles, now see how mankind, without a hope of futurity,` essentially differed from the brute creation, if death were to be the final end of both; for, as Lord Bacon observes,-" if man be not akin to God by his spirit, he is akin to the beasts by his body." These reflections while they increased my sickness by the anxieties they occasioned, only led me further in the field of investigation. Here I found myself stretched upon a bed of sickness, unable to make those bodily and mental exertions that I had, at all previous times in a state of health, so easily effected at my will. I found, as I anxiously awaited the return of day to relieve the tedium of a sleepless night, that by observation of the heavenly bodies, I could calculate upon the coming dawn to the greatest nicety of time:

for while thus extended on my couch, the moon in unclouded splendour would not unfrequently throw her light into my apartment; and as I removed the obstructions to the passage of her beams, she would cast them on my face, inviting me to gaze upon her, as she rode through the dark blue expanse of heaven, studded and spangled with unnumbered stars. Gradually gliding from one pane of my window to another, as I watched her from my pillow, her motion became the subject of my contemplation. I had read something of Newton, and enough to convince me that the ebb and flow of the sea were occasioned by lunar influence. I remembered, also, that the eclipses of this luminary, and those of the sun too, were capable of being calculated to the utmost exactness; and, said I, if thus it be that these wondrous orbs are duly regulated in their motions, and are balanced by the counteraction of powers in the void æther, and all this in so precise a manner that the period of their revolution can be ascertained to a second of time, and their orbits most accurately marked and measured, the hand of an over-ruling designer is manifest. These considerations I had formerly suppressed whenever